New Report: The Top 25 US Public Libraries' Collective Collection as Represented in WorldCat
Title: The Top 25 US Public Libraries Collective Collection as Represented in WorldCat (11 pages; PDF)
Author: Brian Lavoie, OCLC Research
From the Report:
A collective collection is the combined holdings of a group of institutions, with duplicate holdings (i.e., those pertaining to the same publication) removed. This yields the collection of distinct publications that are held across the collections of the institutions in the group.
The top 25 US public libraries collectively account for more than 34 million holdings in WorldCat, representing information resources of all descriptions. Naturally, there is some overlap across institutional collections; aggregating all holdings and removing duplicates yields 13.5 million distinct publications in the top 25 US publics’ collective collection. This total can be further adjusted by grouping publications relating to the same work, which reduces the total to about 11 million distinct works.
Direct to the Complete Report (Including Several Color Charts)
Note: This report was first posted on the NDPL Conference Website
This event is scheduled to take place next week at the Los Angeles Public Library
Hat Tip and Thanks: Data Points & @lorcand
Filed under: Data Files, Libraries, Public Libraries

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.